One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.
Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.
It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.
Depends on the exact word. For example, person is grammatically female, even if the actual person isn’t. Or, a lot of times you can make a different form, but you don’t strictly need to.
It’s actually somewhat of an ongoing debate in places WRT professions: declaring whatever the current word is to be gender neutral, or having mandatory versions for both male and female (German /inen approach).
One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.
Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.
It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.
Guess same for your colleagues.
…which sounds surprising to me, because AFAIK Polish also has separate he/she words (on/ona).
I assume he’s aligning the pronouns to the gender of the noun, rather than the person. “Susie is a great worker, he’s very efficient” kind of stuff.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t a female “worker” in Polish, “workeress” as it were, same for any other such nouns.
Depends on the exact word. For example, person is grammatically female, even if the actual person isn’t. Or, a lot of times you can make a different form, but you don’t strictly need to.
It’s actually somewhat of an ongoing debate in places WRT professions: declaring whatever the current word is to be gender neutral, or having mandatory versions for both male and female (German /inen approach).